At present, there are a plurality of initiation ways of the multipoint conference in the traditional multipoint video conference or in the recent multipoint telepresence conference, but it can basically be classified as two types technically; one is to transmit the conference initiation command derived from the user to the central office system at the network side through the video terminal in the conference place (which can be abbreviated as “the terminal transparent transmission” scheme); the other is to transmit the conference initiation command derived from the user to the central office system at the network side directly (which can be abbreviated as “direct transmission” scheme), not through the conference place terminal.
Since the “direct transmission” scheme has the advantages of simple and diverse developing approaches and good usability, there are relatively many implementation ways of the scheme, for example, adopting ways like WEB, mail, central control subsystem, etc. For example, the specific implementation method of adopting the central control subsystem to initiate the conference is to arrange a set of central control subsystems in the traditional video conference place or the telepresence meeting conference place, and to transmit the conference initiation command selected by the user to the central office equipment of the network side directly. Adopting the central control subsystem, the administration staff does not need to participate in the conference process of each conference, which can lower the labor intensity and save the administration cost greatly.
By contrast, in the “terminal transparent transmission” scheme, the terminal accepts the user command mostly by adopting the way of remote control, and specifically, by adopting the “terminal conference reservation/sitecall” technology, the commands originally sent by the administration staff at the network side, such as conference reservation, conference initiation and conference control and so on, are changed to be transmitted by the user at the conference place terminal side through the infrared remote control, but the remote control of the terminal device is not designed for the common personnel, thus the technology has a great restriction in the practical application. In the “terminal transparent transmission” scheme, it can also use the special terminal management background (generally adopting a PC machine equipped with the special terminal management software) to perform the control. Compared with the “direct transmission” scheme, the “terminal transparent transmission” scheme has more difficulties in development and it has a bad usability, and the administrator needs to participate in each conference and performs the operation. However, the advantage of the “terminal transparent transmission” scheme is that, in the transmission link where the conference command is transferred to the central office system, each device located before the terminal does not know the address of the central office system. So it is not necessary for the central office system to expose the address to other devices except the terminal, and the safety and the stability will not be influenced by these devices, which avoids receiving virus attack because of providing communication ports for these devices (the communication system especially emphasizes the safety and the stability of the central office system at the central part of the communication network, and once the central office system breaks down, its influence is an overall matter); in addition, for the multipoint video conference system adopting the special line, such as E1/V.35 network and so on, the communication between the central office system and the central control subsystems located in the conference place where the terminal is located can still works well without other WAN transport networks.
How to combine the advantages of such two schemes well is a technical problem to be solved in the related art.